The Slayer With Raccoon Eyes
by Polly Oliver
Summary: Story set in a world with Buffyverse mythology, all original characters. K plus for now but as themes develop this may change. Vignettes for now. Some gay characters and themes, nothing explicitly sexual planned.
1. Raccoon Eyes

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Whedonverse, but I do own my characters.

**Author's Note:** I'm not sure if this actually counts as 'fanfiction' though it's certainly inspired by the Buffyverse. It does not contain any of the canon characters, however, at least not so far. My Slayer is all mine, except that the world she lives in is very like the world of Whedon's Slayers, as is her calling very like Buffy's calling. This short piece is one of many that I've written to try to flesh out the characters. I still don't have much of a plot going, though I know the story arcs for several of the supporting cast. More shorts to follow. Oh yeah, and this was originally supposed to be in comic book form, so I have very detailed ideas of what the characters look like.

* * *

**The Girl With Raccoon Eyes**

She had raccoon eyes, like the dark hollows you see when you look into your reflection in a window beyond which lies a darkened room or the night itself, and her hair was straight and dyed black, and slightly frizzy from repeated chemical treatment. She never wore anything with color in it—that's what her remote acquaintances noticed. But as a few people got to know her, they started to realize that this was all a screen, a disguise for what she really was. She was not, as they had supposed, a Goth. _They_ were maladjusted misfits, but they stuck together in one loosely organized, manically insecure pack. She, on the other hand, kept almost entirely to herself, and shunned and was shunned by the real Goths. Also, she didn't pay nearly as much attention to her appearance as the Goths did—her fingernails were never painted black to match her mood or her outfit, she never had one of those ubiquitous studded leather belts looped in her black cargo pants, and her jewelry never changed: silver cross earrings—studs—and a simple silver cross necklace that she wore beneath her shirt as though to conceal—what?—her religious leanings? To add suspiciousness to the picture, the trench coat that she wore every day to school was not only old, worn, and looked suspiciously as though it might be dark brown rather than regulation Goth black, but it _clinked_ when she moved, like she was carrying around kitchen knives or something. But when a teacher asked her about it, she always pulled out a handful of quarters and an innocent expression.


	2. Arden's Story Arc

**Disclaimer:** I do not own any of Whedon's creations: his characters, his world, his mythology, etc. I own only my characters.

**Author's Note:** Another short piece to flesh out character. The Slayer's own story arc. Or character shifts. Whatever.

* * *

**Beginning (The Reluctant Hero)**

A girl with long limp translucent blonde hair in green barrettes sat on the curb next to the middle school in the gathering twilight, deeply engrossed by a science fiction novel. She was a serious faced kid of about 13 or 14 years old, with indifferent clothes (a plain blue and purple sweater, some faded jeans, really old tennis shoes) and brilliant green eyes shaded, for the moment, by long translucent lashes. Her skin was a light olive tone that didn't look to have seen much sun, and her posture hunched and protective, like one who prefers to be left alone but often isn't. The sidewalk she was sitting on was laced with cracks, and was broken and bent upward around a large tree root that had invaded it from the foot of an overshadowing oak tree. The school behind her was in little better shape than the sidewalk, an old brick building with broken window casings and a terrible heating and cooling system, with a sticker in one of these windows saying prominently "Go Hawks!" and in smaller letters, "Turing Middle School." This was a side entrance, and had a small parking lot, on the edge of which the girl was sitting.

Another building, a large shed or storage building, butted up against the back of the school nearby, creating a sort of alley between it and the school, a path which only janitors, guiltily smoking teachers, and the occasional evil undead did not fear to tread, for it was dark and narrow and rather longer than it should be, given the length of the storage shed, though perhaps that was just the distance that fear lends to the imagination.

The vague menace of the alley was not what is on the girl's mind, however, though had it been she would have dismissed it nervously as one of those childish rumors and hype that go around the school—no one _really_ ever died back there, it was probably some animal, or possibly nothing at all—and ghosts don't exist anyhow; no, what was on her mind was whether or not the child prodigy Ender would be taken away from his parents or not to be shipped off to the famous and very far away space station Battle School, to be trained for the fight against the Buggers: her book. Beneath that, however, she was wondering absently where her mother was; she was supposed to have picked her up hours ago, after her meeting. Her worry was beginning to invade her concentration on Ender's predicament.

Suddenly, from the alley, she heard a nervous laugh.

(That would be her Watcher being attacked. Her Watcher, a spacey British woman with silver-streaked black hair, had been coming to introduce herself and show her the ways of Slayage, when she was caught in a bit of a Situation--i.e. she was cornered by a vampire on the way. The young Slayer--for whom I have yet to find a decent name; Arden sounds nice but doesn't quite fit, but it will do for now--has to rescue her, thus plunging her immediately into the whole vampire thing, without the nice 'talking up to it' that her Watcher had planned. So she's a bit freaked out for a while. Well, both of them are, I suppose.)

**Ten Years Later (The Hardened Warrior)**

Arden entered the mage's apartment warily. She never knew for sure when some demon might rush at her from behind a pile of dusty old spellbooks as a result of one of that idiot's failed Summonings. describe more using wariness and disparaging observations on cleanliness

She peered cautiously behind a dusty curtain and her eyes fell upon a sleeping warlock, uncomfortably curled up among scattered books and talismans and black tapers long since gone out. She could tell it was him, and not some golem set there to catch her off her guard when the genuine article decided to show himself, because it had that small brown mole on his neck that he never included on any facsimiles, being too vain. It was strange, though, that his vanity chose to focus on that particular defect, the mole being so small and unnoticeable an imperfection compared to the ugliness that dealings with powerful, dark magic and assorted nasties (some worse than demons) gave to his otherwise beautiful face and form. But then, we often choose to ignore our larger, more fundamental problems in favor of those that are simpler, more diminutive, and _easier to fix_. That was almost certainly the case, however much she wished it were not so, that he really was, as he promised her so often, undergoing a profound reformation of spirit. She would only believe that when he failed to erase the mole from one of his lookalike golems, or stopped making the golems altogether, or some such.

(A lot has changed for the geeky little middle schooler who had to rescue her Watcher after school one day. She became a fierce, dedicated, intensely solitary fighter in high school, and very surprisingly, only through the most accidental of circumstances, she acquired a circle of friends and fellow fighters. Most of them, by the time of this last part, have left for college or jobs, leaving the Slayer to her calling, alone. One friend, who at one point became almost a lover and soon after a serious nemesis, getting a little too power-hungry and demon-friendly, is now a new age-y sort of hippie magic user, a bit of a slimy fellow, and neither friend nor foe. The Slayer doesn't trust him, but occasionally she goes to him for information. One suspects she begins to go to him for a sort of companionship as well, since he is the last remaining link to a time when she was surrounded by friends and the fight against the Forces of Darkness was much more straightforwardly difficult and arduous.)

**Interim (That Creepy Goth Kid)**

Sleepily, Arden raised her head, wincing at the crick in her neck and the ache in her arms where she had laid her head. She saw, with half shut eyes, books scattered and lying splayed on top of each other haphazardly all over the table, the open laptop on the desk showing scenes of the British countryside in its screensaver slideshow, and her Watcher, slumped back in the computer chair with her arms dangling, and snoring loudly every thirty seconds. She had even less endurance for these late night research sessions than had Arden, though she was, nominally, the one who was supposed to be motivating her Slayer to do the proper research on her enemies and her own abilities. In reality, it was most often Arden who would prod her Watcher for information, information only she could know, concerning her enemies, the vast dark underworld of demons and dark magic-users and the Forces of Darkness.

(This is set during the time of "Raccoon Eyes." Arden has become a Goth of sorts to disguise the fact that she's a Slayer: it explains the antisocial behavior, the trenchcoat she uses to carry around her emergency weapons, her frequent and illicit nightly wanderings, lack of motivation academically, the hostility she projects so as not to draw other people into her social circle--because that could endanger them-- etc. It all makes sense.)


	3. The Budding Necromancer

**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything created by Joss Whedon. Don't sue; I have no money to speak of.

**Author's Note:** This is from the perspective of one of the people who will eventually be in the Slayer's circle of friends. She's gonna be a necromancer. Can't explain why yet, and in fact I may have to tweak this bit to make it fit with my eventual plan for her character. I like this character--she's got a sense of humor that's fun to write, and she's very melodramatic. Oh, and GAY. I suppose I should warn about that; it's not a huge part of her character yet, but it will be and ... from reading other fanfictions, I know I'm supposed to warn about these things... (Can you tell I'm paralleling BtVS a bit? The mage from earlier is a lover turned nemesis--screams "Angel"--and he gets power-hungry and, after repenting that, goes all new age-y: Willow. This character is a magic user and a best friend of the Slayer's and lesbian: also smacks of Willow. Although, now that I mention it, Willow seems more bisexual than anything if you're going to be strict about labels. In the show, she's pretty adamant about being totally and completely lesbian, but she can't have been always totally and completely lesbian the way they portrayed her with Oz--she really did care for him, including sexually. So although she might not ever again feel that way about a man, and thus her sexuality is in a grey, MOSTLY lesbian, area, she can't be called COMPLETELY and UTTERLY no doubt ABOUT it lesbian, you know? But I say this from a bisexual's point of view, so maybe I'm biased. Maybe I just want to lay claim to her as part of my little group. And really, labels don't matter. This character, anyhow, is totally and completely gay from the get-go.) If the Slayer, when she comes up, acts a little inconsistently judging by the earlier pieces, it's because this story was written before I got the idea for her character really. This story was supposed to be it's own thing, but then I combined it with my slayer story.

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It was muddy on the school grounds after the rain.

Now, there is a right way to walk in mud and a wrong way. You have to plant each foot carefully and look at the ground to steer clear of the lower ground, where you could get sucked in farther. Every step you take, you must place your foot FLAT on the ground in front of you, not tiptoes like some do, trying to avoid getting mud on their jeans. Fools. The force of your foot per square inch is greater when your on tiptoes, so you get sucked in farther, and you're also off balance, risking a fall in the mud. _DO NOT RUN_, whatever you do.

I ran in the mud. The buses were about to leave and I knew that if I didn't catch mine, not only would I be unable to leave the school until five hours later, but my mom would murder me. She HATES it when I'm late. It's her pet peeve--she overreacts about it, in my opinion, but I guess I can't really argue anyway. Especially if I'm already dead.

Well, the buses left anyway. Right before I reached the bus parking lot, I saw the last yellow end of a bus disappearing around the corner. I swore loudly, slipped in the mud as I stopped running abruptly, and fell flat on my ass. A string of curses was on the tip of my tongue, but I sighed instead and picked myself up, bruised in body and more importantly, in pride. And muddy. Very muddy. Fortunately I wasn't wearing nice clothes. Well, when am I wearing nice clothes? Hardly ever.

I trudged resentfully back inside, kicking the mud as much as possible. I felt it was responsible for all my misfortunes. I was wet and dirty, cold, I had missed the bus, my mom was gonna be furious (and most likely beat my head in with a rusty shovel), I had an impossible history assignment, and I'd been peevish all day. Horrible.

I saw these kind of gothic looking people on my way to the office to call my mom. Those guys are kind of weirdos, although I guess I wouldn't be that out of place among them myself. They wear black all the time, and lots of eyeliner and chains and stuff. The idea is to look depressed and suicidal I think, but really most of them are just sort of socially unskilled and want to have more accepting friends. These guys in particular looked creepy though, not like the usual just plain weirdness of the Goths. And they didn't have any chains. They looked like they were trying to blend in with the wall, but not succeeding because there was something about them that seemed really menacing. Looking closer, I noticed that only one of them was actually dressed all in black, a tall dark and handsome type with a starved, sunken look about him. I guess they just struck me as Goth types.

One of them--a girl with long straight black hair framing her face--came up to me silently, her dark eyes wide and serious. _She_ had eyeliner on--far too much, in my opinion. It made her look somewhat like a raccoon, with her pale pointed face and sharp nose. "Hello," she said, "Are you a witch?"


End file.
